Nasira Zuberi’s ‘Kaanch Ka Chiragh’ launched

Karachi: Amid profuse fanfare and hearty applause, Nasira Zuberi’s Kaanch Ka Chiragh was launched towards the closing of the Fifth International Urdu Conference at the Arts Council Sunday evening.

In her book, Nasira has made very profound comments on life with all its vagaries, in all its colours, the beauty, and the tragedy life engenders. It is a very poignant observation of life, love, and human situations. The book is a reflection of a highly sensitive mind and a really tender heart. Her novel is a reflection of her experiences of life preserved in a very poignant manner.

The book elicited the most heartening of reviews from the critics.

Shahida Hassan, evaluating the work, praised Nasira to the skies as a really sensitive and perceptive person who had the rare ability to capture the intensity of the vagaries of life and fate. “Nasira has the rare gift of magnifying the beauty of life”, Hassan said. “Persons with the intellectual acumen of Nasira are rare to come by”, she said.

“Nasira could easily be equated with the late Parveen Shakir even though she has her own inimitable style which is so poignant”, said Asghar Nadeem Syed, a noted journalist. He praised Nasira’s mastery over Ghazal. “Nasira has demonstrated the relevance of the Ghazal in the modern day”, he said.

Dr Shamim Hanafi from India was mighty impressed with Nasira’s poetic talent and said that what was most praiseworthy about her verse was her most profound and appropriate diction.

Noted poet, Sarmad Sehbai, said, “Nasira’s poetry is such that gender is relegated to a secondary place which is such a pleasant change from the today’s stereotyped gender-based works. Nasira deals with issues from a purely human angle, which makes her works so effective”.

Acknowledging the accolades heaped on her by all the reviewers, Nasira said, “My poetry is my inner voice. It is a description and a profound treatment of life’s situations”. A woman, she said, should be considered as much a part of humanity as man, with the same sensitivities, the same feelings, the same aspirations, the same desires. She said that she did not believe men and women to be each other’s competitors but thought that they were two complements of a whole. Men and women were both subject to the same trials and tribulations of life and as such they needed the same sympathy, she said.